The Wrong Side of Goodbye(34)

“And so your parents met her.”

“Exactly. For a few days they visited and spent some time with her, I guess. Later on, when we were growing up, it was pretty obvious we didn’t look like our two Italian-American parents, so we asked questions. They told us we were adopted and the only thing they knew was that Nicky’s mother was named Vibiana, because they met her before she gave him up.”

It didn’t appear that Dominick and Olivia were told the full story about what had happened to Vibiana, whether their adoptive parents knew it or not.

“Do you know if your brother ever tried to find his mother and father when he was growing up?”

“Not that I know of. We knew what that place was, St. Helen’s. It’s where babies were born that were unwanted. I never tried to find my naturals. I didn’t care. I don’t think Nicky did either.”

Bosch noted a slight tone of bitterness in her voice. More than sixty years later she clearly harbored an animosity toward the parents who gave her up. He knew it would not serve him here to tell her he didn’t agree that all the babies were unwanted at St. Helen’s. Some mothers, maybe all of them back then, had no choice in the matter.

He decided to move the conversation in a new direction. He took a drink of iced tea, complimented her on it, and then nodded at the envelope on the table.

“Are those photos?” he asked.

“I thought you might want to see him,” she said. “There’s also a story about him from the paper.”

She opened the envelope and passed Bosch a stack of photos and a folded newspaper clipping. They had all faded and yellowed over time.

He looked at the clipping first, carefully unfolding it so it wouldn’t split along the crease. It was impossible to determine what newspaper it had come from but the contents of the story made it seem very local. The headline read, “Oxnard Athlete Killed in Vietnam” and the story confirmed much of what Bosch had already deduced. Santanello was killed when he and four Marines were returning from a mission in the Tay Ninh Province. The helicopter they were in was hit by sniper fire and crashed in a rice paddy. The story said Santanello was an all-around athlete who had played varsity football, basketball, and baseball at Oxnard High. The story quoted Santanello’s mother as saying her son had been very proud to serve his country despite the antiwar sentiment back home at the time.

Bosch refolded the clipping and handed it back to Olivia. He then took up the photos. They appeared to be in chronological order, showing Dominick as a boy growing into a teenager. There were shots of him at the beach, playing basketball, riding a bike. There was a photo of him in a baseball uniform and another of him and a girl in formal wear. A family shot included him with his sister and adoptive parents. He studied Olivia as a young girl. She was pretty and she and Dominick looked like real siblings. Their complexions, eyes, and hair color were a full match.

The last photo in the stack showed Dominick in his Navy dungarees, Dixie Cup sailor’s cap tilted back, his hair high and tight with sidewalls. He was standing with hands on hips, with a manicured green field behind him. It didn’t look like Vietnam to Bosch and the smile was the kind of careless, naive expression worn by someone who had not yet gotten his first taste of war. Bosch guessed it was from basic training.

“I love that photo,” Olivia said. “It’s so Nick.”

“Where did he go for basic?” Bosch asked.

“San Diego area. Hospital corps school at Balboa, then combat training and the field medical school at Pendleton.”

“Did you ever go down there and see him?”

“Only one time, when we went down for his graduation from hospital school. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

Bosch glanced down at the photo. He noticed something and looked closer. The shirt Santanello wore was very wrinkled from being hand-washed and wrung out, so it was difficult to read, but the name stenciled on the shirt over the pocket looked like it said Lewis, not Santanello.

“The name on the shirt is—”

“Lewis. Yeah, that’s why he’s smiling like that. He switched shirts with a friend of his named Lewis who couldn’t pass a swim test. They all wore the same thing, they all had the same haircut. The only way to tell them apart was the names stenciled on the shirts, and that’s all the training people checked off when they did testing. So Lewis didn’t know how to swim and Nicky went over to the pool wearing his shirt. He got checked in under his name and took the test for him.”

She laughed. Bosch nodded and smiled. A typical military service story, right down to the guy in the Navy who didn’t know how to swim.

“So what made Dominick enlist?” he asked. “And why the Navy? Why did he want to be a corpsman?”

The smile left on her face from the Lewis story disappeared.

“Oh my god, he made such a mistake,” Olivia said. “He was young and dumb and he paid for it with his life.”

She explained that her brother turned eighteen in January of his senior year of high school. That made him old compared with his classmates. As was required then during the war, he presented himself to Selective Services for his pre-draft physical. Five months later when he graduated high school, he got his draft card and saw that he had been classified as 1A, meaning he was draft eligible and likely to go to Southeast Asia.

“This was before the draft lottery,” she said. “The way it worked was the older guys went first and he was one of the older guys coming out of high school. He knew he was going to get drafted— it was just a matter of time—so he joined up so he would have a choice and he went into the Navy. He’d had a summer job over by the base at Hueneme and always liked the Navy guys who came in. He thought they were cool.”